ABM: The wizard, not the wand –Oracle’s Kelvin Gee

When I was offered the opportunity to guest-host four episodes of one of North America’s most popular marketing podcasts,
#FlipMyFunnel, the first thing I did was say yes!

The second thing I did was reach out to Oracle’s Kelvin Gee.

The mandate for my mini-series is to explore how account-based marketing is evolving in large, complex enterprises, and they don’t come much larger or more complex than Oracle.

With more than 130,000 employees and 1,500 marketers, Oracle is a giant ship to turn. And charting a course toward an account-based future is exactly what Kelvin is doing in his capacity as Senior Director of Modern Marketing Business Transformation.

Many of my colleagues at Quarry know him very well because Oracle has been a client of ours for several years now, and we’ve done some groundbreaking work together.

Sophisticated account-based strategy and execution at Oracle

Kelvin takes podcast listeners deep into Oracle’s approach. “We’ve built a predictive intelligence framework that ingests first-party and third-party data into our data lake,” he says. “We then enable our marketers to tap into that data lake by uploading a list of accounts. We can then append a score, based on every Oracle product, service or solution, that enables marketers to prioritize their accounts.

“We also have our own topic score taxonomy so we can understand who’s engaging with our content on our web properties. Between fit, intent and engagement, we can triangulate who’s a good fit, who’s surging, who’s engaging, and give an appropriate score.”

Over the course of the episode, Kelvin digs into how Oracle supports the continuing development of their marketing team, their approach to measuring success, alignment, piloting, customer-centricity and much more.

…it’s the personalization that makes it account-based. Otherwise it’s just action blasts.

Some podcast highlights

“Modern marketing success is about the wizard, not the wand.” Every business transformation is about people, process and technology. Too often we focus on the technology first; this is a big mistake. Training and enabling people is vital to a successful transformation, and this is where Kelvin’s team puts a lot of effort: in-person workshops, monthly internal webcasts, playbooks and best practice sharing, a Modern Marketing University, “office hours” for 1:1 learning with subject matter experts, and more.

Don’t measure your account-based program using traditional demand generation metrics. “You need to pull out a different yardstick,” measuring account engagement in a more holistic manner. This is an important precursor to targeted-account pipeline, which is one of Oracle’s ultimate success metrics. They also measure “opportunity rate,” which is the percentage of targeted accounts in which they create new opportunities. Don’t assume that standard MQLs or opportunities are the right things to measure.

Target (using predictive intelligence), personalize (using account-level insights so you can create content that really resonates), orchestrate (with Sales) and measure. These are the four pillars of Oracle’s account-based framework. “But it’s the personalization that makes it account-based. Otherwise it’s just action blasts.” Oracle is committed to leveraging account insights to enable deep personalization, at scale across every touch point, so every message and every asset resonates.

Yet to be solved? Integrating AI and machine learning so data can drive a multi-channel experience and orchestrate and optimize content delivery across different channels. The challenge will be to do it at scale while still making it feel personalized.